The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) on Wednesday said that a notification making rounds in the media about extending the deadline for filing income tax returns for 2026 is not true. The FBR called the report “fake.”
“A circular like that has not been issued by the FBR ” said the board’s spokesperson on X.
A message spreading on social media on Wednesday said the deadline was extended to October 15, just like it was last year.
It mentioned that the extension was made because of requests from business groups, taxpayers, and tax lawyer associations.
The FBR said that the deadline for filing income tax returns for the 2026 tax year is still September 30.
Trade bodies and professionals have asked for a deadline extension because the return forms are delayed and online traffic is heavy, which makes it hard to file on time.
Atif Ikram Sheikh, President of the Federation of Pakistan Chambers of Commerce and Industry, also asked the government to push the deadline to October 31 so that trade, industry and other tax filers can finish their income tax returns.
At the time, the Karachi Tax Bar Association sent a five‑page letter to the Member of Inland Revenue (Operations). The letter points out problems, such as delays in draft notifications and constant technical glitches on the IRIS portal that stop tax returns from being filed smoothly.
The FBR said the response was huge. Tax return filings went up from 3.553 million in tax year 2025 to 5.181 million in tax year 2026 by September 29, a jump of 45.8 percent.
The legal deadline for filing tax returns is September 30 each year. In the past, this date has been pushed back two or three times, usually until the end of October.
The year the FBR pushed the deadline twice: first from September 30 to October 15, then to October 31, even though it had said it would not. Those extensions were given because trade bodies, tax bar associations, and the public asked for them.
Recently, extensions came with small penalties, but the new budget has raised these costs a lot, so late filers now pay more.
The Finance Act 2026‑27 made the penalty for returning to the taxpayers list five times higher for companies, now Rs100,000 instead of Rs20,000. For associations of persons, the penalty grew from Rs10,000 to Rs50,000. For individuals, it rose from Rs 1,000 to Rs 25,000.
